Saturday, February 17, 2018
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Czechia currently has 1+2+2 Olympic medals which places us at the 13th spot right now – second among the countries with 1 gold after Japan and ahead of Slovak brothers with 1+2+0 who got their gold from Russian-born biathlete Nasťa Kuzminová. A 20 times lower population of Czechoslovakia is enough to earn the same eight medals as the Unistatians. ;-)

We got a silver medal from Ms Martina Sáblíková, a speed skater: it's her 6th Olympic medal. She's also competing in bicycle competitions – another example of the versatility I will discuss. Because of her imperfect health in the recent year (and because of her 4th spot in the first Korean race), her traditional Dutch foes have argued that she would win no medal in 2018 so this insult has made her (and her coach) motivated and she scooped at least this silver.

Ester Ledecká

Ms Eva Samková took bronze in snowboard cross. She uses the nickname "samice" related to her surname – a "female individual" – but to emphasize that "samice" is actually derived from "samec", a "male individual", she often sports a fake mustache. (In Western Europe and the U.S., the feminists could attack her even for this cute piece of fashion.) She also turns her jacket inside out during the ceremonies – that ritual has worked for her so far and she did it day ago, too.

Some of the first medals were won by Ms Veronika Vítková and Mr Michal Krčmář, the only Czech male medal from Korea so far. You could immediately conclude that due to this 4-to-1 score, Czech men physically suck relatively to the rather attractive and athletic Czech women. And your hypothesis would have a little toad of the truth in it but there are also ways to present the history that look less skewed. Hours ago, Czech ice-hockey men defeated Canada (2-to-3 on penalty shootouts) so of course we always believe that a return to the 1998 Nagano gold place is possible in that Czechia's favorite sport, too.

Friday, February 16, 2018
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The neutron's lifetime is some 15 minutes but there seems to be a cool, increasingly sharp discrepancy. If you measure how many neutrons are left in a "bottle" after time \(t\), it seems that there's one decay in 14:39 minutes. But if you measure a neutron "beam" and the protons that appear, it seems that they're being converted at the rate of one new proton per 14:48 minutes.

This neutron's logo is actually from some cryptocurrency network.

So the neutrons are apparently decaying about 1% faster than the protons are born. No other decays of neutrons are known. Relativistic effects for the beam are negligible.

Days ago, I mentioned that the Slovak court system irrevocably refused all doubts that the Slovak-born Czech prime minister in resignation Comrade Andrej Babiš has been intentionally collaborating with the Czechoslovak communist secret police, StB (ŠtB in Slovak, Státní/štátná bezpečnost i.e. State Security). Thankfully, this criminal organization is at least formally abolished and youth would translate the acronym STB as a "set-top-box" these days. ;-)

Just a day later, the British press – e.g. The Sun and The Daily Mail – was very excited that the boss of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has collaborated with our dear beloved StB, too. In the mid 1980s, Corbyn has met a Slovak ŠtB officer who posed as a diplomat in the U.K. thrice.

The public name of the Czechoslovak "communist James Bond", using the Daily Mail's jargon, was Ján Dymič. However, deeper analyses indicate that the true name of that ŠtB officer was Ján Sarkocy. (Ján is the Slovak version, and Jan is the Czech version, of John. Sarkocy is a surname of the Hungarian origin.)

Wednesday, February 14, 2018
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I just returned from a day-long conference called "New Teaching Methods in Mathematics?" that was primarily dedicated to an explosive phenomenon in the Czech basic schools, the so-called Hejný's method to teach mathematics (TRF texts on Hejný).

Most people believe that the method is named after Prof Milan Hejný who was recently celebrating his 80th birthday – as he reminded us several times – but it's actually named after his father who has taught his son Milan how to love mathematics. This gospel is being used by 700 out of 4,100 basic schools in Czechia and worshiped by virtually all the mainstream media that write about these things.

The basic philosophy of the method is that the teacher shouldn't have any authority in the class, he or she should do basically nothing with the children let alone to teach, and the kids should play and discover all important ideas by themselves. At most, several standardized exercises from recreational mathematics are encouraged to be repeated. The teacher doesn't correct mistakes when they're made, and so on, and so on.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018
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Some people are surprised when Czechs talk themselves down as a nation – why we're not more proud of ourselves. Well, let me tell you something, there are pretty good reasons for that.

Our prime minister in resignation (that's the official title that he acquired when he had to resign after his government failed the confidence vote in the Parliament) Mr Andrej Babiš is currently prosecuted by the police for a $2 million subsidy fraud (billionaire Babiš stole the taxpayer money by pretending to be a rather poor chap with a travel agency) – which should, according to the police expectations, win him 10 years in prison.

Today, another "public secret" was officially confirmed by the court. The regional court in the Slovak capital of Bratislava reviewed Babiš's lawsuit concerning his being a communist rat.

Six years ago, Babiš sued the Institute for the Memory of the Slovak Nation – a government historians' body which formally inherited the Slovak part of the archive after the Czechoslovak communist secret police – because he didn't like to be described as a rat in the historical documents (it's not too surprising he didn't like it – most people don't like when the world knows that they're rats). By persuading his pals, officers of the communist secret police (StB, our sibling of KGB), he was able to win some partial proceedings when courts said that he appeared in the historical records "unjustly". His "trustworthy" friends had told the judges that they hadn't ever seen Babiš, and what they were drinking together in the wine bar was also inaccurate. ;-)

Half a year ago, the Slovak constitutional court brought some bad news to Mr Babiš and redefined the conditions for such lawsuits by dissatisfied agents. First, testimonies by officers of the communist secret police were no longer permissible as the primary evidence because, shockingly, officers of communist secret police are neither maximally trustworthy nor sufficiently free to talk the truth. Second, it's not possible to sue the historical institute because it's not responsible for the validity of the historical evidence.

Monday, February 12, 2018
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The Big Bang Theory is approaching the end of the 11th season which is rather impressive. To mention an example, the January 11th, 2018 episode was watched by over 21 million U.S. viewers. That's actually a higher number than a few years ago.

I keep on watching it and I am still highly entertained and enriched most of the time. Of course the concept is no longer too new, some twists have to be somewhat repetitive, and the interactions must resemble Friends and similar generic shows more than they did in the first seasons. But it's still an extremely gentle and realistic sitcom about physicists and people around them. I am impressed with UCLA's Dr David Saltzberg as an expert that makes the content precise and relevant from physicists' viewpoint.

Well, I also became a big fan of Young Sheldon which is cute and I can relate to so many things, starting with the main boy character's feelings about so many things. And theirs was a wonderful American family, perhaps like the Simpsons etc. Recent episodes of Young Sheldon had some 13 million viewers in the U.S. and the second season has already been commissioned.

Quanta Magazine's puzzle columnist Pradeep Mutalík wrote an amusing and sensible text When Probability Meets Real Life with three probability puzzles. They're a bit more ordinary and less controversial than the Sleeping Beauty or the Monty Hall Problem. But they touch some general principles, too.

He says that scientifically inclined people often try to apply probabilistic reasoning in their lives. It's not perfect but it may be helpful.

In the first problem, Mutalik shows that Bayesian, perceived probabilities often change as new evidence arrives. Someone sadly fell out of an airplane. The probability of death is 90%. Fortunately, he had a parachute. The probability of death is 5%. Sadly, it didn't open. 99.9%. Happily, there was a haystack directly below him. 40%. But there was also a pitchfork there. 99.99%. Happily, he avoided the pitchfork. 40%. But he avoided the haystack, too. 99.999%. ;-) You may give better numbers.

Friday, February 09, 2018
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For some two years, the world's stock markets have enjoyed a calm era with a seemingly healthy growth. The volatility was almost zero and the positive returns looked as safe as if you buy the Bitcoin. Needless to say, aside from the fact that the companies have some intrinsic value which is why investors know that the prices shouldn't drop too low, the emotional part of the price swings is completely analogous in the case of the stocks and the Bitcoin. A difference is that emotions decide about some 30% of the stock prices but about 100% of the cryptocurrency prices.

OK, this calm era ended abruptly when the stock market indices saw a terrible week, with at least two days of 4-5 percent drops per day. The main reason that is cited is the U.S. investors' realization that the interest rates will go up.

Wednesday, February 07, 2018
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Scott Aaronson may have banned me on this blog, he has written lots of insane, extremist, and pathetic things about politics and ideologically sensitive scientific questions, and he's wrong about many physics-related issues, when he places computer science above physics, when he tells you that you have to believe that \(P\neq NP\), and he's been wrong in lots of other contexts.

But I think it's obvious that he's one of the examples of truly intelligent men among those who are visible on the Internet. He's also right in approximately 80% of comments about the foundations of quantum mechanics.

He's wanted to write a long essay about the "interpretations of quantum mechanics", wasn't satisfied with the draft, but now – when he's finally sick – he wrote at least a short version of it,

To make the story short, lots of his short evaluations of the "interpretations" are completely adequate. The transactional interpretation makes no sense at all. The dynamical collapse "interpretation" isn't an "interpretation" but a completely new theory which seems likely to be wrong – one can place lots of limits on the new parameters. I've written about it in the past. (Maybe he only sounds reasonable because he's parroting me here.)

De Broglie-Bohm's pilot wave theory is frank but the choice of the hidden variable is non-unique and arbitrary. I would say it's far from the only problem but it's actually one of the most serious problems undermining the whole motivation to work along these lines. So finally his choice is

Copenhagen, or many worlds? That is the question.

He also says that "Copenhagen" largely means the same thing as "shut up and calculate" (or "QM needs no interpretation") – I agree with that point as well, much like with others. The first problem is when he sort of chooses to be attracted to the many worlds. But even some reasonably smart high-energy theoretical physicists make such a statement.

In his text Unreasonably Big Physics, Tetragraviton classifies the Texan SSC collider as marginally reasonable but other proposed projects are said to be unreasonable.

They include a wonderful 2017 collider proposal in the Gulf of Mexico. The structure would host some new, potentially clever 4-tesla dipoles and would be located 100 meters under the sea level between Houston and Merida.

Tuesday, February 06, 2018
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The latest issue of the Klaus Institute Newsletter – which I am still receiving for free, thanks – discusses many important topics. There's a speech by Czech ex-president Klaus about the EU's blunders; Strejček's discussion in what sense Trump is our role model (this article is also related to Dublin IV we will discuss below); Martin Slaný's brutal debunking of the "gender pay gap due to discrimination" myth (he shows tons of statistics proving that the gap is nearly zero whenever we compare commensurable employees etc.); Klaus' eulogy for Rajko Doleček, a famous Czech-Yugoslav TV proponent of a healthy diet.

But the most important specific topic is a set of answers by politicians and pundits to the question "How should we react to the proposed Dublin IV regulation".

Superficially, that title looks like an amazing prophesy today but the devil is in the details. If you had wanted to use my "precious prophesy" to become wealthy, you needed lots of patience. The Bitcoin was worth $1,000 when I wrote that blog post and it would decrease up to the bottom near $200 or so in 2015. (The drop was mostly due to the collapsed Mt Gox cryptocurrency exchange – this kind of theft became so mundane in the cryptoworld that no one gave a damn when a much bigger theft took place recently in Japan.) So you would lose 80% in a year or two, before you had a chance to add more than one order of magnitude to the original balance.

On December 9th, I reiterated the point in more practical terms when I urged TRF readers to sell their cryptostuff. On that day, December 9th, the dear readers would have gotten about $17,000 for one Bitcoin. Pretty close to the peak near $20,000 – where only a tiny fraction of the people sold their coins.

Sunday, February 04, 2018
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Most Germans are still brainwashed by the political correctness that has run amok – the current degree of Gleichschaltung in Germany may surpass the levels from the Nazi epoch. However, whole regions start to emerge where majorities are disapproving of the multicultural policies. They're mostly located in East Germany and Bavaria.

Cottbus, a city of 100,000 people Southeast from Berlin, 100 km from Bohemia, and 10 km from Poland is a great example. It's been considered a cultural center of Sorbs, a Slavic nation that has been largely assimilated to Germany and culturally disappeared. In 1367–1445, the city belonged to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown – so was under Prague. We still use a nice Czech name for that city, Chotěbuz (Khotyebooz, literally Wake-your-spouse), which is ready for the liberation of the city by the Czech military sometime in a foreseeable future (we use Czech names for a majority of the important German cities) and its reincorporation into Czechia.

I really need to promote these imperial plans at some moments because almost no one is doing this important job in my country. ;-)

I have finally found the time needed to see every page among the 12+7+16 pages of the Japanese papers on the Earth's contribution to muon's \(g-2\) and it's clear that if I had opened all the papers before I wrote my first fast blog post about it, the post wouldn't have been written because the papers are childish and ludicrously wrong. Let me start with superficial observations about their style and background.

First, the authors are clearly not professional particle physicists. You won't find any Feynman diagrams – or the words "loop", "Feynman", "diagram", for that matter – in any of the three papers. Well, particle physicists would generally agree that you need Feynman diagrams – and probably multiloop ones – to discuss the muon's magnetic moment at the state-of-the-art precision.